Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursi... | Hacker News

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		vishnugupta on Jan 30, 2021 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under... Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursion and pointers to Pascal. Looking back I believe Pascal was the perfect language to learn those two fundamental and tricky concepts. It felt aesthetically pleasing and struck just the right balance between the terse (and sometimes quirky) C and verbose COBOL. When I coded up those graph algorithms in Pascal I felt “happy” in a way that can’t be explained and which I didn’t experience in C.

pjmlp on Jan 30, 2021 [–]

Similar experience, I think it boils down to little details handling pointers that are out of reach in C, like reference parameters.

Sure you can emulate them with double pointer indirection, which is anyway what the compiler does, but it adds more cognitive overhead.

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